Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
She looked chastened, but was opening her mouth, when Lucinda slid in by his side.
“Well, hello. This is a surprise. Do you have out-of-town visitors you’re coming to see?” she asked Ellen Macklemore smoothly.
“I…no,” Ellen replied.
“Visiting the spa?” Lucinda suggested.
“No, I—”
“Certainly you’re not here to cause trouble for a man who’s devoted his life to civil service,” Lucinda drawled.
Ellen opened her mouth.
She got nothing out because Madden was now there, asking, “Mom, is this the FBI guy?”
He looked down at her.
She stared up at him with a frank gaze that was not her mother’s amber but instead hazel, with more green than brown.
“Would you please excuse us?” Lucinda’s pure frost crackled toward Ellen. “Special Agent Lazarus has things to do today, and he doesn’t need unnecessary delays.”
“Then why are you here?” Ellen snapped.
“Because he needs me to introduce him to someone, and we have a brief window, so if you don’t mind, we must be getting on with it.”
Ellen glared at her, schooled her features, looked to Rus and said, “Good luck.” Then she painted a smile on for Madden before she walked away.
“She doesn’t seem like much fun,” Madden remarked before Ellen was out of earshot.
And she heard it, if her shoulders tightening told the tale.
Rus swallowed his chuckle.
“Baby, what have I said about saying out loud everything that pops into your head?” Lucinda asked her girl.
Madden tipped her head toward her mom. “You said be honest in all things.”
“We were talking about something else at that time,” Lucinda corrected.
To that came the cheeky, “We were?”
Lucinda assumed a look of a woman searching for strength that God gave her an astute child and what that meant in times like these and for the rest of her life.
He moved to save her.
“Madden, I’m Rus.” He offered her his hand.
Her eyes got big with excitement when she stared at his hand.
She then took it, shook it hard about five times, while saying, “Hi! Will you come talk to my class? Say yes, because I already told them you would.”
He let her go and didn’t swallow that chuckle as Lucinda clipped, “Madden Emery Bonner Rhett. Really?”
“What?” she asked her mom. “You told me to make my own opportunities.”
Lucinda looked to the ceiling and prayed, “Oh my God.”
Rus busted out laughing.
He couldn’t help it.
The latent cute had surfaced fully, it was all wrapped up in her precocious daughter, and he was loving every second of it.
She turned to him. “Do you think this is funny?”
“Did you miss the laughter?”
The peaches and cream of her skin turned more peach than cream.
He cut her a break and again looked down at Madden.
“I’d be honored to talk to your class, but I’m doing something important right now, so it might be later when I can do it.”
How the fuck he forgot what he was doing was investigating the death of her unofficial big sister, he had no clue.
But those hazel eyes filled with tears right before they disappeared in her mother’s long cardigan after she crossed to her and pressed close, hiding her face.
Lucinda rested one hand on her head, the other she wrapped around the back of her neck, and she looked to Rus.
“Sorry,” he mouthed.
She shook her head in an it’s not your fault.
She then crouched in front of her girl, cocooning her with arms and thighs, and they had a whispered conference.
And it was witnessing that, Rus was done fighting it.
He wasn’t going to embark on an affair with his vic’s employer.
But he was going to get to know her along the way, and when the time was right, he was going to embark on an affair with his vic’s employer.
And maybe, if it kept going the way it was, for the first time since Jenn, he was going to allow himself to have something meaningful with a woman he was interested in.
Madden nodded, pulled away, Lucinda straightened, and Madden looked up at him, swiping at her face.
“Sorry, Mr. Lazarus.”
“Nothing to apologize for, sweetheart,” he said gently.
She nodded and took her iPad back to the chair she’d been sitting in when he first saw her.
He turned to Lucinda.
“I made a call,” she told him. “I said pretty please. Do you have time this morning to meet with Thea? She has a break between her nine o’clock and her eleven thirty.”
“Just so I have this straight, we’re taking your daughter when I interview a dominatrix?”
“No. We’re dropping her off at my mom’s along the way.”
Full immersion in the Bonner family.
He shouldn’t be.
But since he was done fighting it, he was.
That being totally there for it.
TWELVE
Official Capacity
Indira Bonner had let her hair go gray.
It was a thick mass of waves and curls with streaks of white that were natural and beautiful.
He was surprised, however, because she was young, at least too young to retire and leave the business to her daughter. Unless he was reading it wrong, she had Lucinda late in life, and over the years she’d simply taken care of herself.